A bitcoin whale who had lost the equivalent of $70 million managed to recover his funds after the hacker returned them. The attack occurred on May 3, when the whale was tricked and ended up losing 1,155.28 wrapped bitcoin (WBTC) or “wrapped bitcoins.” This is the name given to the token used to represent bitcoin (BTC) coins on Ethereum. The user in question was a victim of a technique known as address poisoning. This is a scam technique that emulates almost all (but not all) characters of a bitcoin address or cryptocurrencies. If a user does not realize and verify if the address to which he is sending funds is correct, he could end up being a victim of a scam. Scammers use this technique to confuse their victims with frequently used addresses. When the attack took effect, the scammer exchanged the WBTC he received for ether (ETH), Ethereum's native cryptocurrency, and distributed his loot among several different addresses. The hacker's move from bitcoin to ether caused the value of the funds to fall close to USD 67 millionbecause the price of ETH did not align with the movements of BTC in the week.
How did they recover the stolen funds?
The recovery of the stolen assets was achieved thanks to a series of negotiations with the attacker, through messages through the Ethereum blockchain. The cybersecurity firm Match Systems, which published a statement talking about this milestone, and the Cryptex exchange participated in them.
These were the first messages sent to the attacker to negotiate the recovery of the stolen funds. Source: Etherscan The messages show that they offered 10% of the loot to the perpetrator of the attack, as long as he returned the rest to its owner. However, everything indicates that the hacker returned all of the funds, almost 23,000 ETH. BitcoinDynamic reported that, during 2023, hackers stole almost USD 2 billion in cryptocurrencies. According to the REKT database, only about USD 200 million was recovered.